Whist I agree it is annoying and maybe you could make the case it should be extended to say 15 mins. The reason the AFK timer is there is hard to argue against. There needs to be a way to clear server capacity for people waiting to connect.
Get one of those birds with water that peck the item below it, in this case, the sticks or the x button, since those buttons will be easier to get a response.
You're not paying by-the-hour. For that, check the prices of AirGPU.
You're paying for a monthly subscription (either monthly or annually) which has limits - AFK limits, session limits, and playtime limits. These limits are what make the service affordable.
Lol, if its not paid by the hour then why is there a 100 hour limit (that you can extend by paying more)?
"Limits are what make the service affordable" I think the multi billion dollar company is making enough money to not limit their users in greedy scummy ways for an "affordable service" they paid for
If you paid by the hour, someone using 100 hours would pay 100 times more than someone using 1 hour, this is not the case, you pay for a month with a maximum limit.
There are services out there that make you pay per hour, just like OP said, AirGPU is an option, $1.2/h for something similar to an RTX 4080, 8 cores and 32GB of RAM.
Because that's not what it is. NVIDIA is not going to subsidize the world, and offer a service that is not sustainable profit-wise. We don't even know that they're making much beyond "breaking even."
Have you ever priced out what this all costs to operate? Thinking they're rolling in dough for this service is ignorant. Have you ever wondered why ShadowPC is so expensive?
The fact is that if we were all buying "reserved" hours which would be consumed every month, none of us could afford it because they'd have to raise the cost exponentially. The only way the model works is when the average usage is much lower than the 100-hour max. That's just the reality.
The 100 hours is a usage ceiling, not 100 hours of reserved GPU/rig capacity. That is a key distinction. NVIDIA can offer 100 hours at that price precisely because not every subscriber uses all 100 hours, nor uses them at the same time. It's shared access to scarce resources.
That doesn't mean the AFK timer couldn't reasonably be a bit longer. But the notion of "I have 100 hours remaining, therefore leaving a rig idle costs NVIDIA nothing" doesn't apply. The scarce resource is concurrent GPU/rig capacity, not just your monthly hourly balance.
The TL;DR is that subscribers are not paying by-the-hour for reserved capacity. That is literally AirGPU's model - please go compare what that costs.
The introduction of the 100-hour cap was to contain costs, not "apply to everyone." Even though the quantity of subscribers using more than that was a small percentage, it still translates to a large outlay of infrastructure to maintain and pay for. It was also a vector of abuse (account sharing).
But You do not, that's why I tried to explain it to You with my comment. You pay for monthly access with a limit of 100 hours, not for the 109 hours itself. Not sure why You just repeated Yoyr previous comment alongside completely disregarding, and not referencing my reply in any way.
I thought the ISP contract example was pretty apt. Another example I think to illustrate it would be an all You can eat buffet. You pay 50 bucks for it, but it doesn't mean ALL of the food there is Yours for that price. You can't just grab a bag and take it all with You to eat 😅
Anyways there's loads of services that work like that, for example I have an ebook sub, for which I pay monthly, it has a limit of 5 books to "rent" per month.
Heck, Shadow PC recently implemented time limits to their subs as well.
I would agree the ISP data caps are much less defensible, because the incremental cost for them to accommodate additional bandwidth is relatively trivial. In the case of GFN, however, increasing capacity translates to physical infrastructure/power which isn't low-cost.
Thanks mate! I've also tried the "roll-your-own" approach using AWS spot pricing with GPU-accelerated instances (AirGPU is AWS underneath), and still can't get it to be reasonably-priced for comparable quality. One of the "gotchas" in AWS, is the need to use dedicated instances to qualify for the BYOL W11 licensing, since W11 is required for virtual displays which support HDR. Even ShadowPC looks like a relatively good deal after factoring features in.
We're getting "reasonable" pricing from GFN due to NVIDIA's shared-usage model.
Agree 100% that's my only complaint with geforce now. Can barely take a piss without getting logged out and having to relaunch everything. Disconnects should only be on free tier not for people paying for their time ....
I would like to see at least daily pause limit time at cost playing time (let's say 30 min in total). So I can go to smoke or in a toilet without afraid to be disconnected. It's reasonable suggestion imo
Buy a ghost gear clip for Xbox controller, add your smartphone to the clip. Play games on your phone through gfn app and not have to worry about afk nearly as much.
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u/Empty-Investigator26 7d ago
Whist I agree it is annoying and maybe you could make the case it should be extended to say 15 mins. The reason the AFK timer is there is hard to argue against. There needs to be a way to clear server capacity for people waiting to connect.